Yoko Nogami
is an interdisciplinary artist, was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She resides in Letcher County of Eastern Kentucky. She has served as the Visual Art Department Chair at Pinellas County Center for the Arts in Saint Petersburg, Florida for 10 years before moving to the Appalachia region of Kentucky as the Artistic Director and Program Coordinator for Culture of Recovery Program at the Appalachian Artisan Center in Hindman, Kentucky. Currently, she serves as the Cultural Arts & Education Director with Cowan Community Action Group, Inc. and an independent artist consultant focusing as an advocate for arts education accessibility for all, representing marginalized populations of Kentucky and preservation of old-time music and traditional arts. She just completed working on a coloring book illustration for elementary school children telling the story of the diverse history of Kentucky with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
Internationally exhibiting artist as her trade, she has been engaged in promoting and programing Old Time Music and traversing the mountain paths as her passion, merging nature, music and visual art into her works. Her work is conceptually driven on issues of cultural displacement, gender, parenthood and identity. Many of her works incorporate a fictional character named "Toko" who is a hybrid of herself and her daughter, Tora. Toko explores, reflects, plays and portrays how the artist views the world around her.
As an interdisciplinary artist, she uses diverse media from drawing, painting, photography, performance, video and digital media, choosing ones which aligns best with her concepts.
Her teaching experiences range as adjunct professor of art at the University of South Florida, University of Tampa, Hillsborough Community College and the Art Institute of Tampa, also as an interdisciplinary artist resident at the Creative Clay (teaching Developmentally Disabled Adults through the Pinellas County School Extended Transitions Program), Youth Arts Corps with at-risk youth and Visual Art faculty for Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan.